RAKUKO NAITO (b. 1937)

Project Description

Rakuko Naito was born in Tokyo, Japan. Her main interest has always been shape (geometry and nature) and texture. She graduated from the Tokyo National University of Art in 1958, majoring in traditional Japanese painting. Following graduation, she moved to New York, where she currently resides. During the mid-1960s—after abstract expressionist artist Sam Francis introduced her to acrylic paint—she worked with acrylics, spray paint, and masking tape to create work that emphasized flatness and downplayed the artist’s hand. She also experimented with integrating materials such as sand, nails, and wire into her geometric, colorless works to explore texture and materiality. Recently, her work has concentrated on relief forms made from Japanese paper and techniques.

Naito’s first solo exhibition was at the World House Gallery in New York (1965). Since then, she has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Nagoya, Japan, The Gimpel-Hanover and André Emmerich Galerien in Zurich, Renate Bender in Munich, and the Denise Cadé Gallery in Paris. Her work was included in “Motion and Movement” (Contemporary Art Center. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1964), and “Black & White” (Wadsworth Athenaeum. Hartford, Connecticut, 1966).

Naito’s work is held in the Miami-Dade Community College (Miami), the Kemper Art Collection (Chicago), the Roland Gibson Art Foundation, the State University of New York at Potsdam, and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center (Wellesley College, Massachusetts). She was an artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2003.